The Home Place

By ELIZABETH GILBERT
July 1, 2007, Sunday Book Review

When Mildred Armstrong Kalish was around 5 years old, her
father disappeared from her life forever. To put it more
bluntly, the dad was banished — forced out of town by
Mildred’s strict Iowa grandfather, a farmer, on account of
“some transgression that was not to be disclosed to us
children, though we overheard whispered references to
bankruptcy, bootlegging and jail time.”

That Mildred’s father’s name was never again spoken in her
presence is not remarkable, given the time and place.
Rural, Methodist Iowans during the Great Depression were
not a soft lot; when folks got unforgiven back then, they
stayed unforgiven. What is remarkable, however, is that
Mildred’s shamed father — after being mentioned briefly in
Chapter 1 of her lovely memoir, “Little Heathens” — is
never spoken of again for the entire duration of this book.

Now that, I must say, flies in the face of all current
literary convention. No self-respecting modern memoirist
(myself included!) would ever abandon such a juicy bit of
suffering as a banished father. Surely one could milk
volumes of pain (and book deals) from such misfortune! But
Kalish — while publishing in 2007 — still holds the values
of 1935, when people coped quite differently with their
sorrows. After her father disappeared, Mildred and her
mother and siblings simply moved on — emotionally and
literally. And they moved in with those strict Iowan
grandparents (two rigid souls who “never completely made it
into the 20th century”) which is where young Mildred’s
story really commences — on a farm where “a family of five
was now the responsibility of two old people,” and the
business of instilling character in the young ones began in
earnest.

Some of what follows is unsurprising. You’ll never guess
it, but these kids were taught to work. They planted
potatoes, tended livestock, hayed fields and were beaten
for any lapses in judgment. They did without luxuries
(electricity, leisure, heat) and were never coddled on
account of their tender youth. (“Childhood was generally
considered to be a disease,” Kalish recalls, “or, at the
very least, a disability, to be ignored for the most part,
and remedied as quickly as possible.”)

For anyone from an old-school farming background, this is
familiar territory. “We were taught that if you bought
something it should last forever — or as close to forever
as we could contrive,” Kalish reports predictably. Or:
“When one of us kids received a scratch, cut or puncture,
we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of.” If all
that “Little Heathens” offered, then, were more such
hard-times homilies, this would not be much of a book. But
this memoir is richer than that, filled with fervency,
urgency and one amazing twist, which surprised me to the
point of a delighted, audible gasp: Mildred Armstrong
Kalish absolutely loved her childhood.

It’s not merely that she appreciated the values instilled
by the Great Depression, or that now, in her older years,
she wants to preserve memories of a lost time (though all
this is true). No — beyond that, she reports quite
convincingly that she had a flat-out ball growing up (“It
was quite a romp”) and her terrifically soaring love for
those childhood memories saturates this book with pure
charm, while coaxing the reader into the most unexpected
series of sensations: joy, affection, wonder and even envy.

It’s a rare thing, indeed, for any human to feel she was
truly the luckiest of all mortals to have been raised
exactly when and where she was. But how did young Mildred —
a homely, chubby, fatherless kid, reared on a hardscrabble
Iowa farm during the Great Depression by a melancholy
mother and regimented grandparents who referred to their
shamed daughter’s children as “spawn” — how did such a
seemingly unlucky little being manage to work up the genius
to relish every minute of her life?

I think maybe it had something to do with all that sky.
Having lived a disproportionate sum of her childhood
outdoors, Kalish was greatly overexposed to “the high blue
sky” of Iowa and all that blue oxygen and soaring heavenly
vaulting seems to have made her a little intoxicated. But
she was also dosed by more than her share of barefoot
expeditions over “the astonishingly thick green grass that
carpets the woods in Iowa.” She gets almost woozy
remembering the sight and scent of the “giant pink bouquet”
that arrived every spring when the farm’s one crab apple
tree climaxed into bloom. And Kalish swears that the
privilege of inhaling “the sweet fragrance emanating from
the clean body of a colt, calf, lamb, puppy or kitten that
had been sleeping on the grass and warmed by the sun” is
one of life’s great “pagan pleasures.”

Later in life, Kalish became a professor, and while the
foundation of her writing is still English-teacher English
(orderly, with perfect posture) her old pagan rhythms seep
through every disciplined paragraph. “This was our world,”
she writes, but one gets the feeling that Garrison, Iowa,
was really her world, which she experienced with the awe of
a mystic. In the violet dusk of a cornfield, in the cool
mornings on her way to chores, on the long, unsupervised
walks to school, in the decadence of eating bacon
drippings, heavy cream and ground-cherries, Kalish’s simple
life routinely aroused her to an almost erotic extreme.
(Then again, this was the only kind of eroticism available;
the poor girl was never taught even the starkest
fundamentals of human sexuality, regretting that “in those
days, we were supposed to get such information from the
gutter. Alas! I was deprived of the gutter, too!”)

But she thrilled her senses in other ways. A typically
exhilarating scene finds young Mildred and her sister —
filthy from a hard day of haying — getting washed on the
porch by their mother (“a soaping from head to toe”), after
which they ran “naked as jaybirds across the grassy lawn to
the windmill. Once there, Sis and I pumped pails of
refreshing cold water and doused each other all over until
we fairly tingled.” (Her strict grandmother, witnessing
such wild-child abandon, shook her head and declared, “A
body’d think ... that you’d been peed on a stump and
hatched by the sun,” and it is with utmost respect to the
author that I agree; for all the exuberance here, those
girls might very well have sprouted from the earth.)

Kalish is wise enough to know that the last link to the
past is usually language, and rather than lament what’s
been lost, she stays connected to her youthful world by
using its gleeful, if outdated, lingo. (Tell me the last
time you heard someone exclaim, “Not on your tintype!” or
“Gosh all hemlock!”) She admits self-deprecatingly that
there were certain expressions she heard spoken so often as
a child that she grew up mistakenly thinking they were each
a single word: “agoodwoman, hardearnedmoney,
agoodhardworker, alittleheathen, adrunkenbum, demonrum and
agoodwoolskirt.”

Memories too can run together like this, becoming
mishmashed over time. Not with Mildred Armstrong Kalish,
though. As a natural-born memoirist (by which I mean not
only “one who writes an autobiography” but also “one who
remembers everything”), Kalish has kept her memories tidily
ordered for decades. Now she has unpacked and worked them
into a story that is not only trustworthy and useful (have
I mentioned the recipe for homemade marshmallows?) but is
also polished by real, rare happiness.